With industry-leading 4, 8, and 10 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel and FICON performance, the Brocade 48000 provides high availability, multiprotocol connectivity, and broad investment protection for Brocade Fabric OS and Brocade M-Enterprise OS (M-EOS) fabrics. It scales non-disruptively from 32 to as many as 384 concurrently active 4 or 8 Gbit/sec full-duplex ports in a single domain.

The Brocade 48000 also provides industry-leading power and cooling efficiency, helping to reduce the total cost of ownership. In addition, it supports blades for Fibre Channel Routing, FCIP SAN extension, and iSCSI, and is designed to support a wide range of fabric-based applications. It also supports the Brocade FC10-6 blade, providing 10 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel data transfer for specific types of data-intensive storage applications.

With its fifth-generation, high-performance architecture, the Brocade 48000 is a reliable foundation for core-to-edge SANs, enabling fabrics capable of supporting thousands of hosts and storage devices. To provide even higher performance, enhanced Brocade ISL Trunking combines up to eight 8 Gbit/sec ports between switches into a single, logical high-speed trunk running at up to 64 Gbit/sec. Other services provide additional Quality of Service (QoS) and Traffic Management capabilities to optimize fabric performance.

Utilizing Brocade Fabric OS, the Brocade 48000 also supports native interoperability with existing Brocade M-EOS fabrics.

The Brocade 48000 is designed to integrate with heterogeneous environments that include IBM mainframe and open platforms with multiple operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and i5/OS. These capabilities help make it ideal for enterprise management and high-volume transaction processing applications such as:

1. ERP
2. Data warehousing
3. Data backup
4. Remote mirroring
5. High-availability clustering

Designed for use in the Brocade 48000 Director, the Brocade FR4-18i SAN Extension Blade provides performance-optimized FCIP as well as Fibre Channel Routing services.. The Brocade FR4-18i offers a wide range of benefits for inter-SAN connectivity, including long-distance SAN extension, greater resource sharing, and simplified management.


The Brocade 48000 also supports the Brocade FC4-16IP iSCSI Blade, which enables cost-effective, easy-to-manage Ethernet connectivity so low-cost servers can access high-performance Fibre Channel storage resources.
  

The Brocade 48000 supports the Brocade FA4-18 blade for a variety of fabric-based applications—increasing flexibility, improving operational efficiency, and simplifying SAN management. This includes Brocade OEM and ISV Partner applications for storage virtualization/volume management, replication, and data mobility, as well as Brocade Data Migration Manager (DMM).

Brocade directors are the most power-efficient in the industry, with the lowest documented power draw. They require less power per port (under 4 watts per port) and less power per unit bandwidth than any other director. Brocade is the only vendor to require less than one watt per Gbit/sec of bandwidth.

Learn more about Brocade power efficiencies through this informative ESG Lab Validation paper, or visit the online port power calculator.

4 and 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel/FICON Capabilities for Large-Scale Enterprises
Consolidation	Provides a reliable foundation for server and storage consolidation initiatives Reduces IT infrastructure complexity and associated management costs Scales up to 384 ports in a single domain and a 14U enclosure with up to 1152 ports in a single rack Provides native interoperability with Brocade M-EOS fabrics
Ultra-High Availability	No single points of failure Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF) traffic rerouting Continuous monitoring of environmental components Non-disruptive software upgrades (hot code load and activation) Dual-redundant control processors with stateful failover Redundant, hot-swappable components and redundant power and cooling subsystems Error detection and fault isolation facilities Call-home capabilities to provide remote notification of system events
Intelligent SAN Management	Centralized management Heterogeneous device connectivity Automatic data routing and rerouting Self-healing ISL Trunking capabilities Congestion prediction and adaptive queue management Intelligent fifth-generation ASIC
FICON Support	Supports open systems and System z environments Supports intermix mode Supports cascaded FICON fabrics at 1, 2, 4 and 8 Gbit/sec FICON speeds; N_Port Virtualization (NPIV) supporting multiple Logical Partitions (LPARs) on servers; and CUP
Advanced Security	Enables hardware-enforced zoning by World Wide Name (WWN) Provides secure Telnet access through SSH (Secure Shell) Utilizes Brocade Web Tools over a secure browser using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol Supports RADIUS and Active Directory with LDAP for system access control
Investment Protection and Interoperability	Full backward and forward compatibility with the entire Brocade family of products Field-upgradeable Fibre Channel routing, hardware-assisted traffic forwarding for Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), and iSCSI connectivity
Advanced Fabric Services	Advanced Performance Monitoring Extended Fabrics Advanced Zoning Inter-Switch Link (ISL) Trunking Network QoS Data Migration Manager